


Victory, Nevertheless

by SimonBlackchill



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Haunting, Light-Hearted, Zine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-16
Packaged: 2020-10-20 00:54:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20666627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimonBlackchill/pseuds/SimonBlackchill
Summary: The owner of a small phone repair shop is handed a device that acts strangely. Now, where has she heard of electrical devices being haunted by Pokémon before?This story was written in contribution to PNNAZ, Pokémon Nameless NPC Appreciation Zine. Download it for freehere!





	Victory, Nevertheless

The phone repair shop had been set up only two weeks ago in the local shopping mall. It was downstairs near a cafe which made its quick fix services all the more popular. A customer could bring their phone or Pokétch or Dex for quick repairs and go have a cup of coffee in the meantime. The owner - and the only employee - thought it genius. Of course, this meant busy hours during lunch time and obligatory opening hours in the weekends, but such was business. Such was independent, small business.

This was why the owner very much enjoyed the days when she could focus on the more complex work and not the queue of quick routine screen changes of busiest business hours. One day in particular was inexplicably quiet, but she took her time enjoying the lack of people in the shop and sat down to have a look at a phone that a client had left earlier that day. She had been told that the phone worked in odd ways the client could not quite put his finger on. Applications would turn on and off on their own accord, volume settings would change without him prompting them to, and most irritating out of all its malfunctions was the way it would ring with a strange ringtone only to show no signs of having been contacted.

"Strange ringtone?" she had asked. "Does it sound distorted, or is it a different one altogether?"

The client had chewed on their already short fingernails throughout his explanations. "No, it's… Hard to explain. You will probably hear it."

She looked forward to it.

The shop owner sat down by her high tech workstation and, while keeping a casual eye on the shop premises that showed from the crack of a curtain, started her work. The phone was one of those that was all touch screen. It had soft stickers at the back and loads of fingerprints on the screen. She took out a microfibre cloth to wipe the screen, out of reflex more than out of reason, since she would fill it with fingerprints once again while fixing it. She placed the light blue cloth on the screen, and after two or three circular wiping motions, she heard a distinct giggle.

Yes. A giggle. She leaned back to have a better look at the shop from which the workstation was obscured by the thin curtain.

"I'll be there soon." It was more polite than a simple greeting, at least. No response - perhaps the client was just shy. She stood up from the office chair and firmly removed the curtain to face the customer. Before she could open her mouth, she knew no one would answer. It was about as empty as it had been for hours now.

She frowned. Maybe a customer had visited and then left when they saw she was nowhere to be seen? An amateur mistake, she thought, and she decided to instead work on the phone on the counter. Before she turned around, the giggle emerged again. But this time, she saw that no customer was there to giggle. In fact, the giggle did not at all come from in front of her, but behind her, behind the curtain, somewhere near the workstation, and his time a frown decorated her brow.

"This space is staff only," she said and opened the curtain wider. The backroom of her shop barely had space for two people which was why she preferred to not hire anybody else. She would have seen had anyone been there, let alone enter the room at all, and she did not see a soul. One extra light had been flipped on, however, and that was the phone on the workstation. Her heart jumped to her throat, her breath hitched in there as she tried to remember if she had turned the power of the phone on at all.

But then again, the owner had stated in his problem description that the phone turned on and off on its own. Or something like that. Right?

The giggle repeated, almost robotically similar. Instead of fear the shop owner felt irritation, and she walked to the phone to bring it to the counter. Why was a phone laughing at her? And yet, despite irritation, she felt like she had read about this type of a phenomenon somewhere, some day. It was a shadow of a thought, really, nothing concrete, so she could not stop to connect the dots. The phone needed to be repaired, first and foremost. This was no time for speculation.

She hovered above the phone and gazed at it, not quite knowing why she did not already reach for it with her hand. Something stopped her, perhaps the way the giggle still echoed in her mind or the way the empty room felt even smaller than it already was. Either way, her own mind worked against her long enough for another giggle to emerge. The screen flickered in its rhythm.

It flickered first with a simple white light, but as she watched with rising fear, the colour orange flashed every now and then. A grin. Blue eyes. Another grin. Images of something that tugged at the knowledge in her brain she could not put into words or coherent thoughts, they flashed and repeated on the screen without any pattern or conceivable reason. They just appeared on their own as if to bully her intentionally, as if whatever was causing it could see the look on the phone expert's face. Touching the phone was the last thing she wanted to do, but she knew she had to. She grimaced and reached for the phone, and as her hand approached the giggle became louder, and a static sound accompanied it. The closer she was the louder it became, and she swore she could feel the sound - truly, feel a sound - against the skin of her fingertips when they brushed against the plastic of the phone. On the very second a snapping sound turned everything black.

The screen flashed white, and then black again.

The lights of the shop flickered one, two, three times, then shut down. Darkness spread all around, only the distant light of the corridor of the mall lit the room. The shop owner heard herself gasp. Her throat was as dry as sandpaper, as coarse as desert sands. Silence engulfed the surroundings and danced in unison with the dark. Shadows disappeared and all that was left was their essence, the very thing they were made of.

And when the giggle returned, her heart slammed against her rib cage with the force of a thunderbolt. The pale light of a phone screen appeared on the desk, and turned from pale blue to bright orange. The orange became more dense, turned into a round shape, and then - there was no better way to describe it - escaped the phone. The orange colour escaped upwards, towards the shop owner's head, and she had to take hasty steps back to avoid it. The wall stopped any further steps and she leaned back against it, she had to take a hold of a shelf next to her so it would not fall, and the clattering and clicking from the equipment boxes alerted her to how she was in a minuscule space with something that had probably caused a power outage only in her shop.

Then, it clicked. Her eyes opened wide as the orange creature flashed with blue and yellow zaps. It was about the size of a tennis ball and it danced above the cell phone, and it grinned.

She sighed. In relief. Who knew seeing a Ghost-type would be a relief?

The Rotom swirled around the phone and poked it with its blue appendage. The phone's screen was its own regular pale blue, and the wallpaper of its owner seemed to be a picture of a Mightyena being hugged by a young girl. The shop owner squinted her eyes and looked into the eyes of the Pokémon that had more mischief in mind.

"You hid your presence longer than any other Rotom I've seen," she said. Her lips twisted into a girlish grin. She pushed herself to stand fully on her legs and not lean to the wall any more. "Impressive."

Of course, the Rotom could not respond with anything but a giggle and a somersault it did in the air.

"I'm certain the phone will be fine once you leave it alone." All the problems the client had mentioned could be explained with a brief possession by an electric spirit. But was the spirit going to cooperate? That was another question entirely. She observed the Rotom and its movements with a keen eye, as it was hard to look at anything else in the room when the Rotom was the only thing with electricity, barring the phone. She wondered if the Rotom was the client's, but surely he would have mentioned it. Any Rotom trainer would for sure know the risks the Pokémon carried when it came to electric devices. The client had been way too oblivious to know about this.

"I suggest you go back where you came from, alright?" she said and pointed at the doorway. "If you please."

The Rotom had other plans. It zoomed from one corner of the backroom to the other, observing and investigating its new surroundings. The amount of electrical devices must have been overwhelming, for soon the Pokémon twirled in the middle of the room like a toy that had been wound up by an overly excited, playful child. The giggle turned into an impressed  _ oooooh  _ as it moved from shelf to shelf, in quick angular movements. With ease the Pokémon phased through shelf levels and then through the backroom wall to the shop side of the premises. The shop owner followed and found the ceiling light flickering oddly when the Rotom passed it. The ghost cast no shadow.

"You gotta go home, you know."

Did it really? That was what its face conveyed as it turned to the shop's owner. Perhaps there was a hint of sadness, too, somewhere there. Its gaze darted between the owner and the gadgets she sold. The shop owner crossed her arms and tilted her head.

"No, you can't make a home in my products." Because it became apparent to her very quickly that the Rotom did not wish to leave. It harboured no desire to go back to the cell phone it came from either. "But if you put on the lights… Maybe we can find some arrangement."

Something mutually beneficial, she thought.

* * *

"Just like that?"

"Just like that."

The client turned the phone around in his hands as if unable to believe what he had just been told. The smile on the shop owner's face however betrayed no lies, and why would he disbelieve a professional of good reputation? He shrugged and let out a chuckle as his husband dug out his wallet to pay for the service.

"An odd occurrence for sure, but I managed to stop it from repeating."

"I don't even have a Rotom… What if another one comes by? I thought they were rare but now I'm kind of scared."

"I'm… listen." The shop owner bowed forward to talk quieter. The fuss of the lunch hour was quieting down, and only one customer was present with the couple, looking at phone covers.

"I'm going to try and develop something akin to a virus protection against Rotom… I will let you know when I'm ready to test it."

She could hear the faint giggle in the back room where the Rotom no doubt was feeding on some leftover electricity from the tablet on which she was writing her grant application. This was going to be big, if she was going to succeed.

And if not, at least she had made a new friend. Victory nevertheless.


End file.
